Photoshop keyboard shortcuts for Mac

Adobe groups these as commonly used, and the grouping is honest: between them they cover most of what a retouching session actually consists of. ⌘J is the one to build a habit around first — it copies the current selection onto a new layer, which is how you make a change you can still throw away an hour later.

The bracket keys are the other pair that repays learning immediately. Square brackets resize the brush, curly brackets change its hardness, and neither requires taking your eye off the canvas or your hand off the tablet. They work in every brush-driven tool, not only the Brush.

Photoshop's toolbar is a set of groups, not a set of tools, and one letter selects the whole group. Pressing the letter again cycles through the tools inside it — or ⇧ and the letter, if the Use Shift Key for Tool Switch preference is on. ⌥-clicking a tool in the toolbar cycles its hidden tools too, with the anchor point and Convert Point tools as the exceptions.

The behaviour worth knowing about is spring loading, which Adobe documents separately: hold a tool's shortcut key rather than tapping it and Photoshop switches temporarily, then snaps back to your previous tool when you let go. The delay before it engages defaults to 200 milliseconds and is adjustable under Preferences, Tools.

Adobe notes that most of these appear in no menu and no tooltip, which is why they are the group experienced retouchers use and everyone else discovers by accident. Holding Space turns whatever tool you have into the Hand tool for as long as you hold it — the single most useful entry on this page for anyone working zoomed in.

F is the other one worth internalising. It cycles forward through Standard screen mode, full screen with a menu bar, and full screen; ⇧F cycles back. Combined with Tab to hide the panels, it is how you get an uncluttered look at what you have actually made.

Every one of these is a modifier applied to a tool you already have, which is what makes them worth learning as a set: ⇧ adds, ⌥ subtracts, and the two together intersect. That triple holds for every selection tool except Quick Selection, which has no intersect.

⌘ on its own switches to the Move tool from almost anywhere — the exceptions Adobe lists are the Hand, Slide, Path and Shape tools and any Pen tool. It is the fastest way to nudge a layer without losing the tool you were using.

This is the group with the highest return per chord in the whole application, because every one of these commands otherwise means a trip to a panel menu. ⌘-clicking a layer thumbnail loads that layer's transparency as a selection, and the ⇧, ⌥ and ⇧⌥ variants add to, subtract from and intersect with whatever is already selected.

The bracket run is the sleeper. ⌥[ and ⌥] change which layer is targeted, ⌘[ and ⌘] move the targeted layer up and down the stack, and ⇧⌘[ and ⇧⌘] send it to the very bottom or top. Restacking a complex file without touching the pointer is entirely possible once those four are in your hands.

Number keys set opacity for any painting or editing tool: 0 is 100 per cent, 1 is 10 per cent, and 4 then 5 pressed quickly is 45 per cent. Adding ⇧ sets flow instead — unless the airbrush option is on, in which case the two swap over, which is exactly the sort of detail a translated shortcut list gets wrong.

The blending mode chords all sit on ⇧⌥ and a letter. They are worth skimming rather than memorising, with two exceptions: ⇧⌥N returns to Normal from anywhere, and ⇧+ and ⇧- step through the whole list in order when you want to see what a mode does rather than name it in advance.

Photoshop's type shortcuts split cleanly in two: the ones that move a cursor through text, which behave like the rest of macOS, and the ones that format it, which resemble nothing else on your Mac and are almost impossible to guess.

The last four rows are the reason typographers keep the Character panel closed. ⌥ with an arrow key changes leading and tracking in small steps; adding ⌘ makes the step ten times larger. Nothing else in Photoshop lets you tune type this precisely without a panel open.

Liquify is a workspace of its own with its own single-letter tools, and they do not match the ones in the main toolbar — W is Forward Warp here rather than the Magic Wand group, and B is Bloat rather than the Brush. That is worth knowing before you demonstrate it to anybody.

The Curves and Channels chords below are the ones that make a colour pass keyboard-driven. ⌘2 through ⌘5 select the composite and the individual colour channels, and ⌥ with 2 through 5 switches which channel the Curves dialog is editing without leaving it.

Everything above is a factory default. The list that matters on your machine is the one inside the application, and Adobe puts it behind Edit, Keyboard Shortcuts — or ⌥⇧⌘K. The Shortcuts For dropdown splits it into Application Menus, Panel Menus and Tools, and anything you change there becomes a set you can save, share and switch between.

Two macOS-specific footnotes are worth carrying with you. Photoshop's function key shortcuts collide with the system controls printed on your keyboard, so hold Fn along with F1 to F12 unless you have inverted that behaviour in System Settings. And when a shortcut appears to do nothing at all, another application has usually claimed it system-wide before Photoshop ever sees the key.

Photoshop is among the hardest applications on a Mac to teach by video, because so much of it is invisible. A single letter changes the tool, a held modifier changes what that tool does, and a bracket key resizes a brush — and the person watching sees the brush get smaller with no idea why. Narrating it only works if your voice keeps exact pace with your hands, which it does not.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each key you press as a mechanical keycap in a window above everything else on screen. It has no Photoshop integration, no plugin, no panel and no extension. It draws an overlay; anything capturing your display captures it with no configuration at all.